Interesting to come back and close read this poem. Written a year ago, it could have been written in the last couple of weeks: same place, same focus, same me. This makes me smile, not least because the poem concludes  – no not concludes, it’s kind of open ended – with a joyous note of gratitude for still being here. So, I’ll come clean. I live with cancer. Blood cancer. I do very well on treatment, have done so for seven years. Enough of that.

Like others living with long term health conditions, one of the positives is that there’s a possibility of an enhanced ability to pay attention. No, not to people’s advice and directions. No. What I’m talking about is the ability to pay attention to what is seen, heard… a heightened awareness of what is there, perceived with the senses, but more. It’s the quality of what is there. It can stop you and cause a moment of stillness, silence, consideration.

Back to the poem. I can no longer drive. Some days I don’t make it out further than a few hundred yards from the front/back door. I’m lucky to live on a hill. At the back is a green. Children used to play there, my own included, but that was long ago. Now it’s mostly deserted. Screens, I guess. Sad.

Sometimes at night I go out onto the green. No street lights or traffic make it a good place to stand and look up at the sky.

So it was, the night of the ‘Wolf Moon’. I believe the winter moon is so named due to the sound of winter wolves howling on the plains of America. Rather different to a housing estate in south Wales! Nevertheless, same moon, same cold winter feel to the night.

So there I am out in the cold. Glad to be out of the stifling centrally-heated air of the house, enjoying the freshness, the chill, the sight of this glorious moon. As I stand there in silence, in the quiet, no hurry to get back inside, I am mesmerised by the beauty of this moon and what it seems to convey. For me it’s a constancy, a ‘being here’, a foreverness.

This is such a blessing and, yes, such an uplifting comfort. This sense of being here. Now and forever.

The human form will not be forever.  Still, there is now. And there is always a foreverness in now.

Amanda Rackstraw trained at RADA and worked as an actor before moving to Wales. Following an MA at Cardiff University she taught creative writing in the Department of Continuing Education there until 2017. Her work has been published in various journals including Planet, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Acumen, Modron, most recently with Broken Spine. She has a poem on a sculpture in Dunraven Bay…. Amanda is working on a collection.